Monday, 22 February 2016

OUIL406 Visual Communication - Artist Case Study - Owen Davey

I remember first seeing Owen Davey's work during a Big Heads talk that I went to before I had my interview for the course. It was really cool to see how someone works and have them talk about their work to us and I can clearly remember Owen saying that using vectors/Illustrator is easy once you realise that everything is just shapes.

I really love the aesthetic of his Illustrations, even though I'm used to working more detailed and am usually more interested in detailed illustration I really really love how great this work looks! Everything from the shape of the trees, to the little characters and the colour scheme works perfectly together. I really enjoy this kind of aesthetic when it comes to Illustration, I just struggle to apply it to my own work. I always feel like more needs to be done, that it's lacking detail, that it's not as good as things that I've made before and I think this really limits the work that I'm producing.

As much as textures can be fun to work with, flat colour also works really well when working with vector illustrations like this. Owen uses some textures in his other work but I tried to choose examples that included more flat colour. Theres just a certain charm to this way of producing images, I can't quite put my finger on it but it's just so relaxed and playful, the perfect curves and lines that you can achieve are so satisfying and really add to the aesthetic of the overall illustrations.

I'm really hoping that I can break this kind of mental barrier that I've built up for myself. I'd be really happy to be producing work in this way and in this style I just feel like it's never going to be enough. Like things are too simple. Oh well, lets see how it goes.